You see, the glorious, godly, infallible Peyton Manning is about to come face to face with his mortality. The best regular-season quarterback in history — it’s as if the talking heads have awarded him that title as some kind of consolation prize — is about to enter the stretch of the season in which he’s gone 9-11, which his team so masterfully bungled it all just a year ago.

Cold is passé. The topic du jour is playoffs, and Manning, and when — not even if — he’ll eventually combust.

And he might. He really might. Or, more accurately, his team might. After all, it has a defense held together with Scotch tape that’s taken a form no one could have imagined back in August. Add in Von Miller’s injury and there’s reason to worry, but there’s also reason to worry about the Patriots and the Bengals and the Seahawks and the … you get it. No team is perfect.

No team is perfect, and yet it’s all too easy to talk Peyton, Peyton, Peyton. Everyone’s doing it. In the past week or two, I’ve listened to and read countless analyses of the Peyton Playoff Problem. Very little of said analysis had to do with this season, apart from a mention of Miller, whose 2013 hasn’t exactly been a resounding success on or off the field. No, the conversation has been more about the past, about that loss to the Ravens last January and all the bungled chances in Indianapolis.

And I get it. I really do. It’s hard to ignore a record like that from a player like this. But this is getting ridiculous. On one broadcast, I listened to a discussion of the 2006 season — and Manning’s Super Bowl win in early 2007 — which was eventually picked to pieces. What if Manning hadn’t come back and scored 17 points in the fourth quarter of the AFC championship game to beat the Patriots? And remember how in the divisional game, he didn’t even throw a touchdown pass; it was field goal times five? And what if a fly had flown in his helmet in Week 8 in Denver in the regular season, and he’d somehow gotten agitated, and the Colts had lost that, forever altering their path?

OK, I made that last one up, but you get the point: Nothing Manning does in the playoffs, short of another Super Bowl, will even remotely approach acceptable.

That’s just how it’s going to be, and this may be his last solid chance at a title, but I implore everyone: Shut up. Let’s live in the present, for once, and appreciate what Manning is doing. Even if he breaks Broncos fans’ hearts come one of these Sundays.

Joan Niesen: jniesen@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joanniesen

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